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A thousand pardons — while Sunday at the Southern California Linux Expo was less busy, it was easier to spend more time in more lengthy discussions with visitors who came by the booth at SCaLE. However, while I should have updated this running blog on SCaLE, I didn’t. Further, I had the Paso Robles-to-Santa Cruz leg of the driving chores, and I didn’t get home until late (which explains why I missed the Fedora Weekly News deadline).

So now that the mea culpas are out of the way, I have to say on the whole the SCaLE weekend — from Fedora Activity Day to finish — was an unqualified success.

From Friday’s face-to-face get together where we were actually able to sit in a room with people we talk to on a daily basis on IRC or by e-mail to carrying on two- and three-conversation talks at the Fedora table during Saturday’s “rush hour” (which, essentially, was a better part of the day), I would hope that more regional events have as many attendees as SCaLE did.

Several points about the weekend:

I swear on a stack of O’Reilly “Intro to Linux” books that my spilling a cup of coffee at the OpenSUSE booth was a complete accident on Sunday afternoon. If Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier hadn’t been handing me iguanas to give to the kids, then that wouldn’t have happened. And, I think it’s fair to say that I did clean up the mess . . . .

I spoke more Spanish at SCaLE than I have on any two days since I left Miami 22 years ago, and because I lived in Japan 7 years ago, I kept mixing up Spanish and Japanese in conversation — which probably made me sound like a bigger lunatic than most people think I am.

One of the funniest things was to see Mirano, Malakai and Saskia sitting around the hotel room on Saturday night emptying their bags and going through the swag as if it were Halloween candy.

Happy Birthday again, David Maust (CTO of Tall Umbrella, our neighbor at SCaLE) — any company that give you two birthday cakes on your birthday is worth mentioning.

Press: We had our share of media visitors at the booth over the weekend, who spoke to Karsten Wade about matters Fedora: In order of appearance — Nathan Willis of Linux Weekly News; Kata Tanaka Okopnik of Linux Gazette; Steven Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Daily News; and a guy whose name I didn’t get. Not only this, press photographers were all over the fact that we had XOs at the booth and one child per laptop using them.

Cool things about SCaLE: The guys who organized it (all of them) who hosted an excellent show; the XOs at the OLPC booth, the Earth Treasury booth and, of course, at the Fedora booth; ZaReason’s CTO Earl Malmrose installing Fedora 10 on one of the company’s laptops and keeping it displayed during the course of the show (thanks, Earl!); FSF’s larger GNU stickers (as well as some of the new swag at their table); the constant activity at the KDE booth; finally meeting (after corresponding at length with) David Nalley, Clint Savage, Jon Stanley, Tom Callaway, Joseph Smidt, Scott Ruecker, Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, Joe Smith, Nathan Haines, Jono Bacon, Gareth Greenaway, Stuart Sheldon, Orv Beach.

I’ll blog on this another time, but what is it with people who stop by the booth — any booth, and not just ours — just to waste time in meaningless “let-me-tell-you-why-your-distro-sucks” one-sided conversations? I’m serious — where do these people come from, and don’t they have anything better to do? As far as I’m concerned, these are mostly one-sided conversations — I just smile and nod while I wait for a valid point to arrive in the conversation (which, in more cases than not, never has the courtesy to show up).

(Fedora ambassador Larry Cafiero runs HeliOS Solutions West/Felton Linuxworks in Felton, California, and is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)

SCaLE day one, officially and expo-wise: Doors opened at 10 and throughout the course of the day it was a constant blur of people stopping by wanting to talk Fedora, wanting to talk GNU/Linux, wanting to talk about just about anything. Prior to the doors opening Tom Callaway and Jon Stanley had the booth in order when I brought down the Event Box and media, though I know that David Nalley and Clint Savage also had a hand in getting the booth ready on Friday.

Malakai, Saskia, Mirano and Shaun had an assignment that they performed flawlessly: That was to promote the Fedora and Red Hat presentations that were going on, their mission was to hand out fliers and go around the exhibition area and guide people to the Fedora booth. This is an assignment the four of them tackled with gusto. In fact, the girls came up with a chant:

The best thing about Fedora is freedom,
If you have a computer, you definitely need ’em.

And clad in Fedora shirts, the four of them circulated the expo floor handing out fliers and chanting the newly coined phrase.

Prior to SCaLE, I had made arrangements to meet folks with whom I had a long professional relationship but have never met in person. One person fitting that bill is Scott Ruecker of LXer.com, whom I finally had the chance to meet and have a lengthy conversation with — GNU/Linux user to user and journalist to journalist. Not only this, it was good to see those I see often, like Frank Turner, a regular at Cabrillo GNU/Linux User Group and Felton LUG meetings who made the trip from Santa Cruz County.

Also on hand in SCaLE is ZaReason, the hardware specialist from Berkeley. Cathy Malmrose of ZaReason presented a talk on Friday on women in FOSS which I wish I could have attended, and Earl Malmrose, ZaReason’s CTO, got a Fedora 10 live CD and installed it on one of the ZaReason laptops. Would this be a sign of things to come? I don’t know.

The press stopped by the booth as well. Karsten Wade had a lengthy interview with Steven Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Daily News about the Fedora community, and also Nathan Willis from Linux Weekly News stopped by for a lengthy interview as well.

Media and stickers flew off the table during the course of the day, and as soon as I can process more of the blur that occupied most of the day, I will have more to say, which will probably come tomorrow.

(Fedora ambassador Larry Cafiero runs HeliOS Solutions West/Felton Linuxworks in Felton, California, and is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)

BERKELEY, Calif. – In keeping with its reputation of providing cutting-edge Linux-based computers, ZaReason introduced on Monday its latest desktop model which has a lightness, efficiency and quiet that lives up to its name.

The Breeze 3110, utilizing the Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor, is a small and quiet computer that comes with 1GB RAM, a 160GB hard drive, a CD/DVD drive, Gigibit Ethernet and the latest Ubuntu Linux 8.04.1 operating system.

What sets this model apart from others is its size: The Breeze 3110’s minitower desktop case is 9.5” by 2.5” by 12”, about the size of a box of cereal, and it uses a minimal amount of power – an unrivaled 30 watts of power while running typical home computer tasks.

“Customers have been asking for ultraquiet systems and they have also been asking for the Intel Atom processor,” said Earl Malmrose, Chief Technology Officer of ZaReason. “And this system has proven to be exceptionally durable and has beat our expectations across the board. This makes it an ideal system for a home media server, a family home computer, or a small business office desktop.”

With its Intel integrated video with accelerated 3D, the Breeze 3110 supports monitor resolutions of up to 1920 by 1200. The model also has a four-in-one card reader; rear ports include 4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 VGA port, 1 RJ45 LAN Port, Audio I/O jacks; and front ports include two USB 2.0 ports, one speaker port and one microphone port.

Optional upgrades by ZaReason for the Breeze 3110 include 2GB RAM; 320GB, 500GB and 1TB hard drives; a CD-RW/DVD-RW drive; and a choice between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Ubuntu Server operating systems.

ZaReason also offers their innovative open hardware warranty on the Breeze 3110 which allows the customer to open and explore their system without voiding the warranty. ZaReason is located near the University of California at Berkeley campus and enjoys the benefits of being near the top tier hardware component manufacturers.